Celebrity Biographies
bernardo bertolucci
He is undoubtedly one of the key names in contemporary Italian cinema, a pioneer with Michelangelo Antonioni of critical realism. The filmmaker has died in Rome at the age of 77. Born in Parma, Italy, on March 16, 1940, and son of the writer Attilio Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci graduated in Modern Literature from the University of Rome. There he met Pier Paolo Pasolini , with whom he would work as an assistant director on Accattone (1961). Awarded as a poet in 1962 for “In search of mystery”, he soon became one of Pasolini’s disciples and ranked among the most committed authors of Italian New Cinema.
Of a Marxist-Freudian tendency, he made his debut as a director with a film written by his aforementioned teacher, The Sterile Harvest (1962), where he offers a harsh altarpiece of the Roman underworld. With his second feature film as director, Before the Revolution(1964), was described by Pasolini himself as a master of cinema-poetry, as opposed to Éric Rohmer’s cinema-prose. In this film he tells the dilemma of a certain Italian intellectual, communist and educated in bourgeois culture, revolutionary and conservative at the same time, through the character of a young bourgeois –like Bertolucci himself–, who abandons his Marxist convictions and evolves influenced by a marriage of convenience and the political-ideological disappointment that surrounds it. With this rhetorical work, he would begin his personal psychic-creative itinerary, a self-analysis not exempt from classicism and cinephilia. “I think that making a film –he declared in 1970– means putting a bit of order in the chaos that I carry inside and that I fear until the moment that the cinema gives me the opportunity to free myself from it, at least in part”.
Bernardo Bertolucci is a constant critic of fascism, who, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges and Alberto Moravia , would give birth to The Spider Strategy (1970) and The Conformist (1971), respectively. In these films about betrayal and bourgeois society, he incorporates surreal elements and offers a very devastating denouncement cinema, with crude portraits of a certain current underworld. His skeptical and hopeless attitude, as well as his filmic-narrative precision, are combined in a work that is sometimes as brilliant as it is decadent and even immoral, as is the case with Last Tango in Paris (1972) and La luna (1979) . .
Bertolucci’s creation moves between lyricism and scandal, acidity and symbol, sex and politics, dialectic and manipulation, not exempt from some moments of lucidity. That provocative style and his personal fantasies would be more than reflected in the historical fresco Novecento (1976), a partial vision of the history of Italian communism and rural society between 1900 and 1945. It was an Italian-American blockbuster that was a commercial failure, due to to excessive formalism. Much later, another ambitious work would arrive, The Last Emperor (1989), a bombastic spectacle filmed in China that restored his prestige in the film industry (9 Hollywood Oscars) and the public’s favour.
Therefore, we are dealing with a creator of singular sensitivity, who shows absolutely instinctive principles and who was to be influenced by the aforementioned Pasolini, Josef von Sternberg and, especially, by Max Ophüls , in his internal conception of the most refined scenes. Likewise, he conceives his works as literary operas – at the same time indebted to Giuseppe Verdi –, with a predominance of long shots and highlighting the function of light as a uniting element within the story. Bertolucci’s stylistic maturity seems to lack personal balance, and his beautician staging is at times weighed down by excessive introspection (Sheltering Heaven , Little Buddha , Stolen Beauty, Besieged ). His latest achievement, Soñadores (2003) is his particular critical vision of the May 1968 revolution.